Giya Kancheli

Kancheli read geology before he entered the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, graduating in composition in 1963. His music juxtaposes quiet melodic passages with sudden orchestral outbursts. He wrote seven symphonies — the Fourth is in memory of Michelangelo — and worked for years as music director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi alongside the director Robert Sturua, scoring dozens of films besides. His works include Mourned by the Wind, Lament, Styx and Trauerfarbenes Land; the last is scored for large orchestra without a featured soloist. He left Georgia in the early 1990s, settling first in Berlin and then in Antwerp, and his music was recorded on ECM. Born in Tbilisi in 1935, he died there in 2019. He directed the music of the Rustaveli Theatre from 1971; sources differ on whether his tenure ended in 1990 or 1991. He wrote his only opera, Music for the Living, with Sturua; it was staged in 1984 and again in Weimar in 1999. A scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service took him to Berlin in 1991, and in 1995–1996 he was resident composer of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic in Antwerp. His film scores, more than forty of them, include Georgi Danelia's Mimino and Kin-dza-dza, and his works were first performed by conductors such as Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic; he came to Sofia in 2013 for the first performance there of Styx.